# Gremlins in your computer?  Maybe I've fixed 'em.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gremlins-in-your-computer-maybe-ive-fixed-em/274477>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [November 12, 2004, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gremlins-in-your-computer-maybe-ive-fixed-em/274477 "2004-11-12T23:50:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jurph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/50afbb/32.png) [@Jurph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jurph)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2004, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gremlins-in-your-computer-maybe-ive-fixed-em/274477/1 "2004-11-12T23:50:20Z")

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So I’ve been having [computer](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=278150) [problems](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=285584), and today, in a stroke of blindingly obvious inspiration, fixed them. The problems were very strange – manifesting as random crashes, random freezes, all clearly attributable to mysterious hardware problems. Sometimes they seemed like video problems, other times they seemed like sound card issues. Occasionally I was _certain_ that it was the hard drive. I had deduced this morning, after a 24-hour run of memtest86, that it was the RAM, and even got an RMA to send it back to newegg. Then I had one last idea, which came to me while I was factoring the coefficients of a cubic equation.

I run an Athlon 2400+/M (mobile) designed for overclocking, but I’ve been running it at stock speed, 1.8 GHz. Because Athlon serial numbers and speeds aren’t really correlated (there’s a mild linear relationship) I decided to double-check what the stock multiplier is.

The stock speed is **133 x 14**. Sure enough, I’d been running it at **150 x 12** – inadvertently overclocking my motherboard (and on-board sound card, and RAM…) and under-stressing my CPU. I’ve gone back and successfully run all of the programs that had exhibited wonky behavior. I am now running stable at 1.667 GHz (my motherboard only supports multipliers up to 12.5x) and happy as a pig in mud.

Just thought I’d throw that out there for posterity’s sake.